One day makes up for 25 years of a missing link to Chinnor!

After 25 years of planning, fund-raising, false starts,
and lots of negotiations, it took a small team of Chinnor & Princes
Risborough Railway (C&PRR) volunteers just one day of hard work out on the
track at Thame Junction to finally reconnect the heritage line to the National Rail
network.

The connection installation had been well prepared by the
volunteers and was executed precisely as planned on Sunday 21 February. It is one
further vital step that the eight hundred members of the C&PRR have been
waiting for and the heavy workload was made possible by a member purchasing a
Road-Rail vehicle and more volunteers coming forward.

C&PRR Chairman, Danny Woodward said, ‘An extraordinary
amount of dedicated hard work has been carried out to obtain the consents and
permissions required to re-open the connection, and over the last 25 years we
have been dealing with British Rail, Railtrack and Network Rail. Apart from several
specials when the line was temporarily reconnected, the short gap in the track may
as well have been 100 miles! In reaching this stage today, credit is greatly
due to the small team at Network Rail who are involved with the project. They have
demonstrated a real drive to ‘get things done’ and they share our ambition for
the future.’

This does not mean that the preserved railway will be able
to commence train operations to Princes Risborough just yet. The heritage line
will have to wait until the Track Access Agreement, currently being negotiated,
is signed and that crews are fully familiar with the revised operating
instructions. It is hoped that the momentum will continue and we will see the
preserved railway once again reach Princes Risborough later this year.

Meanwhile, it does open up the possibility of mainline
operators bringing charter train services to Chinnor and also other locomotives
visiting the railway. The line was temporarily connected for one train in 2010
when a steam hauled special from Banbury arrived at Chinnor and again in
October 2013 when a series of services were operated by Chiltern Railways.

The new connection has been made to the former Thame
Branch, which is still in use by Network Rail (NR) and Chiltern Railways as a
siding. The next fund-raising challenge for the railway is to purchase a lease
of NR land at Princes Risborough and the remaining section of the former
Chinnor branch, then to replace the platform and track along the parallel formation.

The adjacent mainline railway is also expanding and
Princes Risborough already has trains running to Oxford, Aylesbury, London Marylebone,
Birmingham and, in a few more years, Milton Keynes and Bedford – the opportunities
for interchange with the heritage line are growing! And given that Chinnor’s
volunteers have just completed the first restoration phase of Princes
Risborough North signalbox (for which an interim lease with NR is now in place),
the heritage railway is suddenly becoming noticed and growing. The line
experienced a double-digit percentage increase in passenger numbers in 2015
creating a new record.